Tag Archives: Olympics

Smokey Bear wants to prevent fires, does he belong to your resistance?

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So there’s a t-shirt being pitched by the alt-mod-left, who want to coopt the anti-Trump rallying cry RESIST. It’s Smokey Bear with his head down and fist raised, invoking the Black Panther salute made iconic at the 1968 olympics. Except his fist is on FIRE, and it’s Smokey. WTF. Is he resisting putting it out? Smokey Bear’s singular catch-phrase is about YOU, PREVENTING FIRES. As usual, he’s holding a shovel, a reminder that fighting forest fires is essentially ditch-digging. So what is Smokey resisting? The urge to douse the fire burning up his hand? The image reminds me of the innanity of moderate democrats. Both “Smokey” and “Bear” have long become euphemisms for cops. This Smokey wants to embed with your resistance crew. Knock him out with a shovel.

Michael Phelps wins gold to “right the wrong” of USA missing out on a medal

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Minutes after winning the first of his 2016 gold medals, Michael Phelps interjected into an interview of his teammates “this [victory] was to right a wrong” referencing a loss in 2012 in which he was robbed of a medal apparently. Not because somebody cheated, or a bad call was made, but because Michael Phelps had willed a win that he didn’t then earn. Being “wronged” by not being given a medal. Doesnt that pretty much illustrate American Exceptionalism?! As if the US sports media was interested in explaining such a thing. Last minute decisions to let Michael Phelps intercede in further relay teams, for the sake of breaking medal hording records, as opposed to physical feats, comes at a price obviously to the other relay swimmers. We’ve heard about the hopes of would-be Olympians dashed by the boycotts of 1980 and 1984. Add the Phelps-first priority of 2016.

Film critics toe corporate line to re-kill messenger Gary Webb, after Hollywood

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Gary Webb
AT BEST “KILL THE MESSENGER” portrays suspiciously deceased journalist Gary Webb as a heroic sleuth who refused to compromise his principles. At best, the film re-reports the enormous crime which Webb exposed in his series DARK ALLIANCE, that the CIA’s support of the Nicaraguan CONTRAs in the 1980s involved facilitating the smuggling of drugs into the US, in such large quantities as to precipitate the crack cocaine epidemic, delivered to our major inner cities by the CIA. UNFORTUNATELY the film muddies the crack connection, as Webb’s detractors did back then. Two deliberate plot omissions suggest this is probably not a coincidence.

Conveniently the screenplay ends before the years when Gary Webb was able to elaborate on those links. By then he’d lost his audience. Unfortunately the film that might have given his life’s work a main stage reprise chose not to go that far. Does it matter anymore? These days the CIA and its covert cohorts are understood to have authored a litany of unimaginable evils. So it’s not too early to demonize the CIA. Evidently someone thinks the American public is not ready to be shown the racist stratagems of corportate class war.

Exposing the genesis of the crack attack on African American ghettos is clearly a missed opportunity for a film in 2014. Given Ferguson. Given the rising awareness of our government’s coordinated and premeditated containment and criminalization of dark-skinned populations. Let’s remember that while the US was fighting Nicaraguan rebels, it was also at war with the Black Liberation Army. Funding and arming drug warlords was the same strategy Brazil used to administrate the favelas, via proxy gangs. One might say that LA’s Bloods and Crips played domestic Contras set loose to destabilize community building efforts by militant Black Power.

UNPARDONABLE however are the film’s departures from the truth, which paint a curious fiction as if to indemnify the national press from its complicity with the intelligence community. Two lies will stand out to anyone who was there. (Did the filmmakers think their audience would be only millennials?)

First, the San Jose Mercury News was hardly a “local news outlet” unfamiliar with handling national stories and unknown to the average reader. The Mercury News was an award winning paper which competed with metropolitan mastheads. I can’t imagine its employees aren’t indignant by the film’s yokel characterization. The Los Angeles Times’ vindictive campaign to defame Gary Webb was hardly driven by professional embarassment over a missed scoop.

Second, the Contra-CIA drug smuggling link was suspected well before Gary Webb brought it to the mainstream. I remember during the Iran-Contra Hearings a decade earlier, the alternative media often lamented that the official investigation had been narrowed to exclude mention of the cocaine connection.

These amendments might be excused for simplifying the plot except that they minimize the breadth of the corporate identity of Webb’s censors. How very 90s of this narrative to pretend that Capitalist media outlets compete for news scoops like highschoolers at a science olympics. Newspapers and networks have always only ever peddled the themes their owners dictate. Media consolidation has only meant the manufacturing of public consent has become more uniform, perfectly illustrated by the collusion of the tag-team that hit Gary Webb.

AND AFTER HOLLYWOOD FAILED GARY WEBB, the film critics were waiting with daggers.

David Denby begins his New Yorker review by associating KTM with other crusading journalist thrillers, “some depicting real events, some not”, then pointing to director Michael Cuesta’s “paranoid” TV work, finally contriving that the film botches “many contraditory assertions.” Um, sorry, neither. But I do worry that giving all thumbs down will succeed in scaring away viewers. Denby finishes by making it all about actor Jeremy Renner, un-ironically aping the campaign waged on Gary Webb, overtly described in the film, shifting the focus from the story to all about the messenger.

The Washington Post dispatched one-time Webb adversary Jeff Leen to reprise the hatchet job begun when Gary Webb broke the story. Labeling Webb as “no journalism hero”, Leen’s rebuttal hangs on the technicality that no CIA “employees” were implicated, ignoring what everyone knows post-Blackwater, post-Wikileaks, that the US has long outsourced its crimes, from torture to food service. Dimwit.

US disparagement of Sochi Olympics is the cultural front of the new cold war

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What a sad, embarrasing scene. What ungrateful guests Americans appear. Russia throws a magnificent party in Sochi, the penultimate of accasions almost still outside the bounds of what the international corporate media can control, and western journalists do everything they can to poop the party. Is Sochi really only Putin’s ego trip? Do you think the Russian people haven’t invested a lot of pride in these Olympics?

Hey! The White Wealth Olymics are on!

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Olympic commentators are fawning over the winter sports dynasties, some of them actual petty-royal lineages, from European feifdoms and colonial sultanships, family trees full of resort-dwelling ski bums, literally, jetsetters. Agree the commentators: “It’s in the genes!”

City For Champions? Colorado Springs is city of blood-doping Olympian cheats

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Colorado Springs is not home to an Olympic Training Center because of our competitive nature, proclivity for classic games, nor certainly athletic bloodlines — it’s our high altitude that draws athletes in training so they’ll hit the games with a competitive advantage against the majority of teams stuck at sea level. Boosters who look to promote the city’s Olympic identity ought maybe admit its true character before taking for granted that people want to celebrate it.

Putin releases oligarch, blasphemers and hooligans. Obama pardons turkeys

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2013. They are arguably Russian President Vladimir Putin most formidable adversaries, behind the scenes, in popular culture and in the international court of public opinion. The corporate press think Putin did it to rehab his anti-gay stance in advance of the Winter Olympics. The most powerful leader of the free world can’t find a single motive to offer amnesty to his nemisees under house arrest in London and Moscow, or throughout his nation’s vast prison system. At Thanksgiving, President Barack Obama jokes that the power of a US president extended only so far as to be able to offer clemency to Thanksgiving turkeys, so he pardoned two.

Oops. McDonalds shill Ryan Lochte says he ate sponsor’s food in Beijing, won fewer medals.

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Literally, Ryan Lochte scored his piece of silver at the 2012 London Games for endorsing McDonalds’ unolympian crap-food. But in London Lochte waited until after his competitive events to “go to McDonalds”. His fellow shill Michael Phelps added a vicarious, thus safer, third person endorsement, as one might exclaim “He’s going to Disneyland”. At the 2008 games in Beijing, Lochte purports to have eaten the official sponsor’s crap “for breakfast, lunch and dinner over 10 days” but came away with one less medal. Lochte didn’t see SUPERSIZE ME to know his fast food mythology has already been debunked.

Should the London Olympics remember the 1972 Munich Holocaust? Do you?

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America can’t memorialize the 1972 Munich hostage killings, because that act of terrorism was not unlike our own airstrikes or special ops raids, against purported enemy combatants, off the field of combat, except we don’t even try to kidnap them alive.
 
Of course the Israeli Olympic wrestlers and weightlifters killed in Munich in 1972 should be memorialized. But to call the deaths a massacre pretends the German police meant their ambush to kill everyone.* What happened at the 1972 Olympics is being recalled as the “Munich Massacre” but even the propagandists tweaking the Wikipedia entry don’t have the temerity to doff the disclaimer that “massacre” is the informal name. Shall we recall what happened? On September 5, 1972, PLO terrorists infiltrated the Olympic village and tried to kidnap Israeli hostages to exchange for 234 Palestinians held by Israel. Two Israelis fought back and were killed. Next the eight gunman and their nine captives were led into an ambush at a military airfield. After a 1 & 1/2 hour gun battle on the tarmac, trapped under the helicopters by police snipers, the PLO killed four of their captives. A police investigation revealed the remaining five captives may have died in sniper crossfire. This detail is disputed, but a secret financial settlement was sought and reached with German authorities. So, was Munich a massacre or a botched hostage rescue? Do words matter? The Mossad’s retaliatory murder of an innocent Moroccan waiter in Norway, mistaken for the Munich mastermind, is trivialized as the Lillehammer Affair.

Proponents want an Olympic tribute to the Munich Massacre “so that it never happens again.” Boy does that ever have a familiar ring to it. Look out for an Elie Wieselish re-tailoring of the original narrative, Steven Spielberg’s Munich being only a recent example of a myth-makeover remembrance.

To begin with, the PLO kidnappers were a faction of the PLO called the Black September Brigade, named after the Black September purge of the PLO from Jordan. This ouster, aided by the US and fought by Syria, was initiated by Israel’s attack on the village of Karameh, in which the PLO suffered 200 killed, to the IDF’s 28. Not a massacre because 150 PLO fighters were taken captive. Wikistorians taking liberties with translation are calling the PLO group “Black September”, with the effect of obfuscating the event which preceded the Munich operation.

The Munich raid to seize hostages was actually named “Operation Iqrit and Kafr Bir’im” after the Christian villages of Kafr Bir’im and Iqrit, ethnically cleansed by Israel in 1948. Villagers were granted right of return by Israel’s supreme court, but overruled by the military. An attempt to return had been repulsed by police as recently as August 1972, as the Olympics began.

Next, the identity of the Israeli athletes is always left incomplete. With the exception of the 18 year old Russian immigrant, all the Israeli hostages were IDF soldiers who’d participated in military acts against Palestine, Egypt, lebanon, Jordan, or Syria, and so are not exactly the innocent civilians of current retellings.

Who killed the Israeli captives during the gun battle with German police? An immediate investigation found that sniper fire may have hit the captives, as it had also severely wounded a fellow policeman. A cover-up long obscured the official reports. While this could be pretended to protect the German participants, it also kept the blame on the PLO gunmen, which would have been critical to justify Israel’s “eye for an eye” revenge killings.

Did the gunman strafe their hostages with bullets upon seeing the arrival of the police armored reinforcements? The only witness accounts come from the German authorities. We might accept that the lead PLO gunman lobbed a grenade into the first helicopter with the intention of killing the four hostages it contained, if they were still alive. An autopsy revealing that one of the Israelis died from the flames is used the emphasize that the grenade, and thus a PLO terrorist, certainly killed him.

Though the German police admitted potential culpability for the deaths of the five hostages in the second helicopter, a later analysis put convenient blame on a particular gunman, one of them ones captured and who eventually escaped justice by being released. Certainly this narrative would be critical if Israel hoped for popular support for their effort to hunt the gunman down.

Many of Israel’s revenge killings involved car bombs which risked collateral deaths and injuries. Assassinating the “mastermind” killed eight others, including a nun, and injured 18 more.

Whether the PLO gunmen killed the Israelis or not, even the operation’s planners can’t be said to have intended it. No one masterminded a massacre.

Of the PLO participants in Munich, five gunman were killed, and three were captured. Those three were released weeks later to meet the demands of a subsequent hijacking. Israel’s Mossad boasted of having tracked them down and assassinated them shortly thereafter. But accounts vary, and one of them was interviewed decades later for a documentary. What’s known is that Israel implemented an “eye for an eye” operation that over 20 years hunted and killed 20-35 Palestinian targets. They weren’t sought out to take hostage but to murder, and most of them were unconnected to the Black September Brigade. The Mossad long-arm-of-the-law theme was less about revenge than deterrence, because anyone who might have masterminded or abetted the Munich plot was planning a kidnapping not a murder.

If a massacre is measured by an imbalance of casualties, let’s look at the numbers. After 11 Israelis were murdered, Israel retaliatory airstrikes killed 200 in Syria and Lebanon, an IDF raid killed up to 100 in Lebanon, and the Mossad targeted up to 35 in subsequent assassinations. Here’s an accounting:

Sept 5-6, 1972
11 Israeli athletes, coaches former IDF
(2 killed by BSB in initial break-in, 9 killed during the ambush rescue attempt, possibly by crossfire)
1 German police
5 PLO gunmen

Sept 8, 1972
IAF retaliatory airstrikes on PLO bases in Syria and Lebanon.
200 Palestinians killed, including women and children

IDF Operation “SPRING OF YOUTH” raid on Lebanon, April 1973
3 PLO suspected planners
12-100 PLO members
1 PLO wife
1 Italian woman
2 Lebanese policemen
Unknown number of Lebanese civilians

Mossad Operation “WRATH OF GOD”, (20-35 targets over 20 years)
PLO translator of disputed BSB involvement, Oct 1972
PLO senior official, December 1972
Palestinian activist “expertly” pushed under bus, London, 1972
Jordanian Fatah rep, January 1973
Law professor at Am Univ of Beirut, April, 1973
Replacement for Fatah rep, Athens, April 1973
(2 BSB minor members injured, Rome, April 1973)
PLO director of operations for BSB, June 1973
Moroccan waiter, mistaken identity, Norway, July 1973
3 Arab-looking men, Switzerland, January 1974
Arab security guard, Spain, August 1974
PLO rep, blamed on the Abu Nidal Org, London, January 1978
2 PLO reps, Paris, August 1978 (3 injured)
PLO suspected “mastermind”, car-bomb, January 1979, also killed:
4 Bodyguards
1 British student
1 German nun
2 Lebanese passersby (also 18 injured)
PLO military head, Cannes, July 1979
2 Palestinians, December, 1979
PLO rep, Brussels, June 1981
2 PLO senior figures, car bomb, Rome, June 1982
PLO senior official, car bomb, Paris, July 1982
PLO senior official, drive-by, Athens, August 1983
PLO Secretary-General, drive-by, Athens, June 1986
PLO official, car bomb, Athens, October 1986
2 Palestinians, car bomb, Cyprus, February 1988 (1 other wounded)
PLO suspected head of intelligence, June 1992

What’s that? The ratio is 11 to 335 and the Israelis want to call it a massacre? If you count the Palestinians killed in the initial Black September attack on the PLO in Jordan, the comparison becomes irrelevant.

But the Munich ratio is nothing compared to the 1,500 Gazans killed in Operation Cast Lead. Now there’s a massacre.

*ON THE OTHER HAND. The botched hostage rescue in Munich might very well have been a massacre. Do we really want to go there? The German snipers who initiated the gun battle at Furstenfeldbruck Airbase may really have behaved with a total disregard to the fate of the Israeli hostages. With the antisemitism that prevailed in Europe, and still prevails there among the working classes, it’s very likely the policemen looked at the gunmen and their captives with equal scorn. If the bound Israelis weren’t hit in the crossfire, it could certainly be held that the sniper attack provoked their killing. The coverup and subsequent private financial settlement reached between Germany and the Israeli survivors suggests a culpability of the like. In that respect, if European Jews look back at Munich 1972 and say it was a massacre, I believe them.

Do the 2012 London Olympics need extra security forces to protect Israeli athletes or to arrest them?

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Organizers are worried about inadequate security for the Olympic Games set to begin next month in London. What security threat are they anticipating exactly? It’s true the Olympics have become a bullseye for globalization critics. More and more, both athletes and groupies represent the jet set. But other than past indigenous protests in the Commonwealth territories, which amounted to no more than nonviolent blockades, what does the UK need paramilitary forces to defend against this time? Another 1972 Munich massacre? At the summer Olympics in Munich, the Israeli wrestling team was murdered by PLO terrorists called the “Black September Brigade”, but the official narrative leaves off that the Israeli athletes were targeted because they were IDF soldiers who’d participated in the counter-insurgent near-complete rout of the PLO, known as Black September. So that raises an interesting question. Is London expecting to host Israeli athletes who were veterans of Operation Cast Lead or the attack on the Mavi Marmara, whose assassinations someone might want to avenge? British authorities could address that most handily with preemption, because this time the IDF campaign against Gaza was widely regarded to have violated international law. Warn Team Israel that any such veteran setting foot in England would face prosecution for war crimes. While London is at it, issue the same warning to Team USA. Yeah, and Team UK, and Team Germany, et cetera, for Afghanistan, Libya, now Syria. It’s become the 2012 NATO War Criminals Olympics, gone professional, no amateur status terrorists need apply.

Wikileaks Cablegate on 2008 Olympics: US rats on Dutch radio avoiding IOC & Chinese censors via complex intertubes

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Aftenposten’s monopoly on unleaked-by-Wikileaks-leaks went comparatively stale this weekend for American readers at least, but there was this nugget in a Beijing Olympics “Situation Report.” The last item of an August 21, 2008 diplomatic cable told how a Dutch pirate radio operation was able to circumvent Chinese censors and an International Olympic Committee exclusivity contract. By reporting “Radio 538 is using a complex system of ISDN telephone lines,” the US embassy was less ratting out the Dutch than revealing its own misunderestimation of Chinese internets and/or intertubes.

22. (U) Dutch Radio Station Evades Censors:

The Dutch commercial broadcaster Radio 538 on 08/19/2008 continued to defy both the Chinese censors and the International Olympic Committee (IOC) by broadcasting live from Beijing during the Olympic Games, according to a Dutch radio report.

Officially, the only Dutch broadcaster registered to broadcast from Beijing during the Olympics is public broadcaster NOS. Unlike officially registered broadcasters, Radio 538 is not required to send its feed through the Olympics Broadcast Center, where Chinese authorities could theoretically censor its output.

Instead, Radio 538 is using a complex system of integrated service digital networks (ISDN) telephone lines to transmit its broadcasts out of Beijing and to foil authorities´ attempts to block its transmissions.

Radio 538´s connection with its Beijing studio has been down for only 20 minutes on one day since the beginning of the Olympics, according to the Dutch radio report.

For the regularly appended list of USG cables released exclusively in Norway, check this Aftenposten link. For a daily summary written for an English audience, check Views and News from Norway.

16-year-old Jessica Watson completes solo circumnavigation, flunks geometry

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When 16-year-old Jessica Watson arrives in Sidney tomorrow, she will be the youngest person to sail around the globe alone. The precocious Aussie will be denied an official record however, for the same reason the Olympics enforce a minimum age for gymnasts, protecting suggestible minors from overzealous parents ostensibly. The snubbing might seem an unenforceable formality, but it turns out Jessica comes up short on another technicality, the same principle which holds that girth is measured at the waist.

The “circum” in navigate refers to circumference. Let’s take nothing away from the young adventurer who’s proven herself plenty brave, a capable sea-person, and undeniably a class act. Criticism of her geometry or vocabulary is aimed really at her internet fans who are now raining expletives on sailing officials who would deny her a world record.

Just as we credit her home team for media, communications, and consultation, readers of her blog know that Jessica set her autopilot to daily coordinates provided to her. Thus it was Team Jessica which charted the interesting compromise.

While no one expects round-the-world sailors to follow the equator, circumnavigation at minimum requires traversing an orb over its circumference. You cannot, as an extreme example, run a few paces off the South Pole and call yourself a circumnavigator. Soon we’d have swimmers circumnavigating the North Pole. The de-icing of the Northwest Passage likewise will be providing new shortcuts for would-be record breakers. Jessica Watson’s ability to traverse the south seas owed entirely to techncal innovations which have yielded stronger crafts and better storm avoidance. The latitudes formerly named for their impenetrability, the Roaring Forties, Furious Fifties and Screaming Sixties, are now open to sporting pursuits. Making the straight shot across all longitudes there is a distance a fraction of the equator. As a result, ocean racing adjudicators have decided that a proper circumnavigation should mean at least 21,600 nautical miles across the seas, a distance that approximates the width of our planet.

Did Team Jessica miscalculate? More likely it was an expeditious decision to enable a finish before the youngster’s 17th birthday. Going the extra distance would have added extra days to Jessica’s sixteen years. The course was thus plotted to make Sidney at greatest haste. Which meant setting their own interpretation of a circumnavigation.

To do this, Team Watson contrived a simplification of the minimum requirement: crossing all longitudes and passing over the equator twice, which their sailor dutifully did. Their explanation to Jessica’s fans sounds officious, but is not universally accepted as equivalent to a full circumnavigation. Can you measure a waistline by passing the tape around one leg so long as you extend it up through a belt loop? On a globe such an approximation comes up short. Level of difficulty to sail it, still enormous, but a foreshortened route.

Actually, Miss Watson’s Burmuda rig will have traveled 23,000 sea miles taking into account her drift and the tacks required to work the wind, but her charted course accumulates to only 19,000. Imagine shortening the Tour de France to substitute sections on stationary bikes. No less effort, but not quite the Tour.

Watson’s official start was delayed by a mishap that sent she and Ella’s Pink Lady back for repairs and may have sealed the fate of her world record.

Pink Lady’s departure made the news in a bigger than expected way over a half year ago. Concerns about allowing so young a person to attempt a solo circumnavigation appeared vindicated the next day when Jessica struck a freighter on her very first night. This meant a return to harbor for the Pink Lady and having perhaps to reroute the journey of shorter duration than initially planned.

Perhaps the racing officials are right to retire seafaring records based on age. With modern technology and remote systems having become what they are, what does it mean anymore to differentiate “assisted” or “unassisted”? 2009 witnessed the first Atlantic crossing of a catamaran captained by a quadriplegic. By any conventional understanding of seamanship that feat was impossible. Before long, who or what is put at the helm will be irrelevant, watercrafts will progress –“unassisted” meaning untouched– guided by unmanned vehicle operators at computer consoles. Perhaps the control could eventually even be crowdsourced online.

The crowd’s attention to Elle’s Pink Lady was owed undeniably to its captain being a 16-year-old girl. For a period on the official blog, public comments were closed off to shed followers whose infatuations may have been unflattering to the schoolroom audiences which Australian television news was drawing to the website. If I had to guess at what was jettisoned, it was probably fan fiction fantasies thinly veiled as hopeful advice to avoid Somali pirates. While some followers were no doubt titillated by the thought of a vulnerable young woman alone on the dark sea, to the average audience, the opportunity to check-in on the Pink Lady in 10-meter swells in near-real time, took vicarious adventuring to new heights.

On the other hand a 16-year-old captain’s log had obvious drawbacks. The facility to wax poetic hits at an age later than the teens apparently. Previous age-record holders like the teen who took five years to circle the globe in the Dove was in his twenties when he chose to write about it. Jessica’s narrative was extemporized and followed a pragmatic motif. Her notes reflected the singular focus of young specialist whose technical proficiencies might have crowded out wider observation skills. Preoccupied with her boat’s speed, in between, nothing. Her typical report was peppered thus:

“Yeah, so, nothing new to report really, so, yeah, so, that’s about it for me, so, yeah.”

When Captain Jessica wasn’t relating the progress the Pink Lady was making, or the occasional repair attempt she planned to revisit, her thoughts were on the day’s menu, the supplies packed for her which she opened like a Christmas chocolate calendar, supplemental gifts scheduled to lift her spirits at regulated intervals and the latest blog comments to which she relayed personal replies.

In addition to the typical teenager sweets fixation was another unexpected first, although clearly enough foreseen by Team Jessica’s sponsors. Video blogging on a daily basis meant that Jessica had to worry about her makeup and hair. She holds the world record I’ll bet for first solo circumnavigator to concern herself with wardrobe and beauty products.

For the most part, Jessica impresses like the average gifted and talented, and disappoints where you’d expect it too. How interesting are the whims of a child of millionaire parents able to indulge a not-necessarily world-changing enterprise? Elle’s Pink Lady is a model of commercial endorsement banking on publicity spectacle. No different from most high profile sports, professional tennis for example, but of virtuoso certainly less athletic. It’s more like Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous, watch their children take to the sea.

With Jessica’s upcoming arrival garnering excitement, isn’t it fitting that an unpredicted non-sponsor is stepping forward to reap product placement. It turns out the Australian conglomerate responsible for the “Pink Lady” apple considers the name of Jessica Watson’s project a trademark infringement, but they’re ready to settle if she considers adding them to her endorsements.

“Warrior” drops peacekeeping pretense

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Wounded Warrior OlympicsCOLO. SPRINGS- Just down the street, all week, the Olympic Training Center hosts the Warrior Games,
a Special Olympics for wounded vets. And there it is.
Not injured peace- keepers, not disabled freedom-bringers, not usurpers of foreign lives and liberty taken down a notch, but Wounded fucking Warriors. I suppose it had a ring to it that trumped showing moral decorum. We’re soliciting slogans for a cross-the-street banner.

BABY KILLING, cost: ARM & LEG
CLEAN CONSCIENCE: PRICELESS
Is that to mean undue disrespect? Just what part of 1.4 million deaths seems out of proportion to you?

If “warrior” is just a word, so is killer. Why not wounded paid-killers? Or wounded not-sorry death dealers?

Again, if disabled veterans need something to keep themselves busy and out of the halls of the VA, they can give back to Iraq or Afghanistan and stop feeding the Department of Defense propaganda machine. A four star general joined the Colorado governor to give props to their uniformed mercenaries. All volunteer, remember. Do they recognize the harm they did? Do they feel like they were duped into the deeds? They’ve got a lot more soul searching to do if they think salvation will come of rolling up and down a basketball court in a wheelchair. Community Service. Figure it out.

Support the troops? Of Course — Bring them home!

Proud of our boys? You’ve got to be kidding.

Al-Qaeda insurgent training inevident in NYC Times Square fireworks bomber

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With a spectacular three digit death toll today, the Iraqi insurgence acquitted itself of all suspicion of having trained and/or coordinated last week’s would-be Times Square fireworks bomber. Explaining the deadliest series of bombings so far in 2010, US military propagandists scramble to blame so-called “al-Qaeda in Iraq” even as they try to tie the NYC firecracker-wrapped Jerry cans to the same resistance experts who improvise shaped-charges for their domestic explosive devices.

The media calls Faisal Shahzad a bomber, but some might question whether the attribution was earned. A failed bomb is still a bomb, but was the Rube Goldberg SUV even all that? It was a lit fuse going nowhere. An Olympian for example, has to have competed at the Olympics. A suicide bomber needn’t have effected a suicide, nor detonated a bomb, but probably has to have been found in possession. Likewise, a sniper, his rifle, a serial killer, his kills. Shahzad left a parked vehicle with something resembling the caricature of the makings of maheh, he’s a pyrotechnician, but obviously we know he’s not even that.

Polo fits White Wealth Winter Olympics

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Ralph LaurenYou might wonder why a polo player features so prominently on the official clothing of the 2010 Winter Olympics. Well of course, because the haberdasher au contract is Ralph Lauren, who one-upped Lacoste so many years ago when so many of the hoi polloi began sporting the little alligators that yuppies needed to differentiate themselves once again.

Of course a snotty sport like polo is not unrepresentative of winter sports. It’s exclusive, requires expensive equipment, and near full-time access to snow, meaning globe-trotting jet setters. What’s appropriate too about this logo is its size. You didn’t remember it being so big? It’s targeted at generation Ralph Lauren, now needing reading glasses.

Yanks overseas pretend to be Canadian but how do you do that in Vancouver?

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Since the overt militarization of Pax Americana, US citizens traveling the world are advised to pretend they’re Canadians. It only took this week’s unexpected team USA victory over Canada in men’s Olympic hockey, to ignite anti-American feelings. Even before the games began, the USOC’s USA House was the only hospitality venue whose address was not made public, conveniently too because it was safely not open to the public. Now visitors leaving USA House are reminded not to wear or behave in any fashion that would distinguish them as Americans as they make their way to their accommodations.

Security warnings didn’t lessen even as Canada took revenge with a win against the US in Women’s Hockey. Canada’s speed skating victory wasn’t helped by Apolo Ohno’s complaint that his disqualification might have been owed to the supervising judge being Canadian.

Will a Canadian victory in the finals be enough to ameliorate feelings against Americans who dominate every other aspect of North American culture so obnoxiously? In either outcome I foresee American visitors and athletes taking their leave with as little fanfare as possible.

Just as McDonalds is uncontested as it pretends to speak for all Olympic athletes that their toxic McNugget is the “favorite of Olympians,” so is the American war machine able to coopt US athletes for their imperialist message. Critics of the Olympics are ridiculed for politicizing the games, yet militant nationalism pervades the ceremonies.

The television announcers remind us that the USA hockey players have been paired with beneficiaries of the Wounded Warrior program. Each stick-wielding, armored, helmeted ice warrior thus plays for the honor of an actual US soldier. A recognition I believe of America’s undying desire to have a second chance to kick ass.

I don’t know anyone rooting for Team USA, the finals rematch would seem to be an extraordinary opportunity for Obama-spirited diplomacy. These athletes are all NHL players of mottled nationalities, probably most Canadian as much as they are American. What better chance to let the victory to the host. Can you imagine the US asserting its dominance over its coalition partner? What could come of that?

Americans have precious few fans outside the homeland. Oh, they tell us, “we love Americans, just not America.” But in Vancouver this week, that was not true. Imagine Canadians added to the list of world people grown tired of the idiot American brute. Canada will take the sympathy of the rest of the Commonwealth with them.

After two weeks of patient cheerleading against US Olympic supremacy, suddenly I’m jumping up and down for a US win!

It’s just a game. The white man’s war on the world is not.

Medal count reflects Wealthy Olympics

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The US media ranks the US ahead in the Vancouver Winter Olympics based on most medals won. The non-American consensus rates competitors according to their gold, Germany often leading. If your average win is silver, it does seem queer to declare yourself in first place. Not to mention that total wins appear irrevocably linked to the size of the teams fielded. Inspired by 538 giving 2010 odds based on statistical analysis, I thought about other likely predictors. Number of athletes and population size are both outweighed by Per Capita Income as the deciding factor for final rankings.

Gold
Medals		 Total
Medals		  
Country		 Team
Size 		 
Population 		GDP per
capita 		Prob.
Rank
8 32 USA 215 309m $ 46k 1
9 27 Germany 153 82m 39k 3
8 20 Norway 99 5m 77k 4
8 17 Canada 206 34m 39k 2
6 11 South Korea 46 50m 16k 9
6 8 Switzerland 146 8m 66k 5
4 13 Austria 81 8m 45k 7
4 10 China 90 1,336m 3k 10
4 8 Sweden 106 9m 43k 6
3 14 Russia 177 142m 9k 8

Rachael Flatt will not be assimilated

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Rachael Flatt is neither fat nor homely, but it doesn’t take an Olympic judge to downgrade her prospects in figure skating. Embarrassingly, sports commentators were poised to preempt confused TV viewers from sitting up in alarm. Who is this stout little duckling flailing, albeit with precision, among our swans? The awkward freshness of Flatt’s execution made it look all the more miraculous, but I think the between-the-lines verdict was that Flatt flunked her screen test.

Words like graceful and beautiful pepper the usual skating play-by-play, but not when Rachael Flatt was on the ice. Compare their stilted discomfort to her airtime to their effusive fawning over everyone else. No sooner was it Rachael’s turn than announcers began to interject praise for her great personality and high intellect. I doubt not a few of Olympic competitors are very bright, but apparently Rachael runs a deficit of qualities for which the color commentary must over-compensate. It seemed as much to apologize for whatever freak accident of competition left the door open to Flatt, as to prepare the audience for the judges’ swift condemnation.

Were they surprised when Flatt skated flawlessly? Apparently it’s not enough to be the athlete, Olympic skating requires a ballerina. I thought that’s what Ice Dancing was for.

It’s no coincidence that Olympic faces are only the most beautiful, all with straight white teeth. Colorado Springs High schooler Rachael Flatt is imperfectly lovely, possessed of a photogenic quality all her own, if not theirs. Did you know the Olympics mean to celebrate only humanity’s televisible champions?

Presenters and judges alike know what they are after. The Olympics are a showcase for the epitome of our ideals, not merely athletic feats, but our aesthetic aspirations. It’s a 4-H meet for eugenics.

Vancouver 2010 Olympic destinations

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Olympic sites

Amtrak Station 1150 Station Street
Apple Store at Pacific Center, 701 West Georgia Street
USA House at Level, 1022 Seymour Street
Hilton Metrotown 6083 McKay Avenue
Olympic Tent City protest encampment, 58 West Hastings Street
Adbusters Magazine Culture Jammers, 1243 West 7th Avenue

RED THREAD marks the 2/13 demonstration against Opening Ceremonies. Protesters assembled at the Vancouver Art Gallery, marched down West Georgia Street, south on Homer Street, around Public Library and unto Robson Street where violence erupted as they were blocked from reaching BC Place.

Forget Olympic Gold, US claims a ring

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ringsThe Olympic rings represent continents don’t they? I can almost see the globe laid flat traversed by the five rings, even the colors seem culturally appropriate. B, Y, Bk, G, R are the US, South America, Europe, Africa and Asia. What is North America but the US with its oil reserves isolated in the state of Canada and its cheap non-citizen labor pool confined in the state of Mexico? Actually the Olympic organization conflates South America with North to accommodate a ring for Oceania. Australia can have a ring of clear wallpaper. The indigenous revolution of Latin America deserves a ring of African dimension. If any powers can stand merging it’s US and EU. The Winter Olympics could be represented by a single white ring.

By an odd coincidence E.U. are the European Union’s initials for les Etats Unis, the United States.

McDonalds: Eat Like Fat Olympians

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The authentic moment in the McDonalds commercial “Eat Like Olympians” is where an athlete walks amazed past tables of A-list Olympians stuffing their faces with Chicken McNuggets. He’s not starstruck, but dumbstruck at the sight of athletes poisoning themselves/selling out. Would they, could they? Not and hope to win. Center stage is US speed skater JR Celski and it’s a damn shame. I always hope medalists will seize their moment in the spotlight to hold their fists high like Mexico 1968. No, they’re so self-obsessed they shill for McDonalds and dope the minds of their admirers with Olympic strength toxin.

Canadian audiences have to suffer a wide campaign of misinformation from a handful of their Olympic hopefuls: Cassie Campbell, Brad Martin, Crispin Lipscomb, Cindy Klassen, Shawn Johnson, and Patrick Chan. Each pretending to eat the garbage.

How is being received? Have a look at this preteen rebuttal on Youtube entitled Olympics + McDonalds = Fat Olympians whose main character is a loving tribute to Shaun White.

Polk awards Neda midst propaganda

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How do you give formal recognition to journalism merit in a media landscape adulterated with propaganda? Award the dubious distinction to the pseudonym for commercial disinformation: anonymous! This year a Polk Award went to the unknown Youtube videographer who captured the death of Iran “Green Revolution” martyr Neda Soltani, a wrenching sequence which transcended exploitation to give iconic status to Iran’s election discontents. Fitting, while another snuff film is circulated to drum up interest in the Vancouver Olympics.

The Wide World of Sports used to loop the famous ski jump wipe-out, but we were assured the skier escaped without major injury. If he’d died the footage would have been buried like that of race care crashes. But that was another age. Now a fatal luge accident gets played again and again, the pretext being to compete with Youtube, but obviously it’s to amp interest in what has traditionally remained a lackluster Olympic category.

What’s the point of awarding nobody? Time Magazine did it when they named you as Person of the Year. It’s called pandering to everyman, this time as a bald excuse to give Neda another chance to incite anti-Iranian sentiment.

Olympic opening ceremonies dedicated to the late inhabitants of Marjah

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ThunderbirdWith television viewers transfixed by the opening ceremonies of the Winter Olympics in Vancouver, US Marines in Afghanistan are undertaking an explosive Fallujah-class opening ceremony in Helmand Province against the little town of Marjah, a so-called Taliban stronghold. Thousands of Afghans who couldn’t get out in time have been cast as burning stuntmen for this remote reenactment of western expansion via genocide; a nod, if not an acknowledgment of the remnants of Vancouver’s native resistance. Will Marjah be lit up on cue with the arrival of the Olympic torch, spectacle-wise?

That’s how many Black Hawk Down?

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COLO. SPRINGS- A spectacular migration of Army attack helicopters traversed the city sky yesterday, flying south to Ft Carson where they will catch trains to faraway winter fear-breeding grounds in the news.
cos-helicopter-convoy-south-ftcarson

cos-helicopter-convoy

It took only one Black Hawk Down to terminate US ground operations in Somalia. If you’re hoping such a milestone could be a benchmark for Iraq or Afghanistan, unfortunately “hawk” also denotes the plurality. How many Black Hawk have to go down before Americans cry uncle? This week we are nearer to finding out.

I know I’m mixing Apaches with Chinooks, but I’m grouping all multi-million-dollar vertical-flight aircraft together obviously to note that the US lost three over the weekend in Afghanistan, with a commensurate record setting loss of US soldiers. Which will prove the more alarming?

Earlier in the week, Brazilian paramilitary forces lost a helicopter in a gunfight over a Rio slum, where a war is suspected to have been declared on the poor in preparations for the 2016 Olympics. The significance of sophisticated weaponry downed by common insurgency tactics is not going uncelebrated.

Isn’t it interesting how the official reaction, whether you’re a spokesman for the Brazilian military or Israel’s is to deny any possibility that the aircraft might have been struck by enemy fire? Uniformly that it the denial, which almost always proves untrue. As if even the cause of the crash matters. What’s probably critical to military strategists is that opponents not receive accurate feedback about the effectiveness of whatever tactics they used.

Meaning armchair strategists have no reliable information to go on, other than to keep a tally.

Obama relinquishes O to Olympics

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obama olympic rings
I thought the decision of where to host the 2016 Olympics might have been an offer the IOC couldn’t refuse. Copenhagen faced giving the West’s Great White Hope an early black eye, but didn’t hesitate. Chicago’s loss is no TKO for Obama, but it doesn’t help a fighter to trip on the ropes when everyone’s holding their breath for “Waterloo.” I find it odd that Democratic party strategists thought it worth the risk to pit the 0-0 bantamweight against Latin America, Obama tic tac toe the original “Si Se Puede!” Curious timing on David Letterman’s part, taking center stage with an impromptu television confession, extorted on the eve of the Girl From Ipanema’s predicted triumph.